‘Cat Person’ is culturally relevant, but it’s just repackaged feminine pain
ANALYSIS | The fictional short story is our generation’s ‘Yellow Wallpaper’
A New Yorker short story titled “Cat Person,” about a text-based flirtation turned into a waking nightmare, resonated with a chilling number of women. Kristen Roupenian’s cautionary tale couldn’t be more culturally relevant. But for anyone who pays attention to fiction, it also couldn’t be more predictable.
The country is in the middle of a mass reckoning destined for history books. Powerful men across a swath of industries are being told they are replaceable. Their careers are toppling as one headline after the next unveils new sexual harassment and assault allegations. To find the last time so many members of Congress left their jobs, for instance, you’d have to go back to the Civil War, when lawmakers were disputing slavery.
In a disturbing paradox, we are reassured by today’s brave accusers, the “silence breakers,” but all the more aware of the insidious power imbalance that led to this moment in the first place. It’s a lot for a grieving society to process all at once, and to those who are just tuning in, it feels almost surreal.
Allegories, or stories with a hidden parallel, have helped make sense of tumultuous realities. We read “Animal Farm” to unpack the Bolshevik Revolution, “The Crucible” to scrutinize McCarthyism — and now “Cat Person,” as absurd as the title may sound, is a crucial generational insight into the reality of rampant misogyny.
The female protagonist, Margot, is 2017’s answer to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” another wildly popular American short story, published in 1892. Its unnamed, middle-class narrator feels denigrated by her husband, John, a doctor who diagnoses her with “temporary nervous depression — a slight hysterical tendency.” He whittles away at her freedom, both creatively and literally, until her sole amusement becomes the yellow wallpaper in the bedroom where she is confined. She becomes so obsessed with the pattern that it takes on a life of its own. To John’s horror, his wife begins tearing at the paper, desperate to free the woman she sees “trapped” inside. The narrator feels liberated. John, traumatized by her insanity, faints.
Gilman wrote the story to shed light on the male-dominated medical profession’s excessive diagnoses of mental illness in female patients. Doctors’ orders discouraged women from crafting their own identities and fostering independence through creative pursuits, such as writing. Gilman experienced the phenomenon firsthand when she received a confining treatment for her depression. It brought her to the brink of insanity.
The New England Magazine published “The Yellow Wallpaper” after the Atlantic Monthly’s editor rejected it, according to a paper by Brandeis University professor Susan Lanser. “I could not forgive myself if I made others as miserable as I have made myself,” the editor had reasoned, fearful of openly acknowledging men’s loud dominion and women’s quiet rage.
Despite that editor’s aversion to a harsh reality, “The Yellow Wallpaper” persisted and became a sacred feminist text. You might remember reading it in a high school English class or hearing it referenced on an episode of “Riverdale,” testaments to its permanent status as a cultural fixture, a grim reminder of women’s slow trickle out of the domestic sphere.
After more than 100 years, the narrator’s pain has just been repackaged into a new allegory for patriarchal abuses, this time as a 20-year-old college student’s anxious attempt to extricate herself from the whims of a broken 34-year-old man.
Margot’s initial text messages with Robert allow her imagination to run wild. She paints a vivid picture of him — witty, handsome under the right circumstances, mysterious. But when they finally go on a date, Margot grows disillusioned as their months of virtual banter quickly fall flat in the real world. She makes mental excuses for Robert’s awkwardness, blaming herself. Maybe she had unintentionally hurt him; maybe she had intimidated him. She overanalyzes until she plummets right back into her fantasy, ignoring all the red flags of his mediocrity: his performative apathy, his offensive jokes, the way he thrashes his untamed tongue when he kisses her.
This suspended dream state carries Margot all the way to Robert’s bedroom, where they have lackluster sex that leaves Margot so disappointed that her illusions are finally powerless against her revulsion.
In true millennial form, she tries to ghost Robert into oblivion, but he won’t let go. His texts are incessant, and Margot is trapped. She almost misses him — “not the real Robert,” of course, “but the Robert she’d imagined on the other end of all those text messages.” And when her roommate finally begs her to bluntly tell Robert she’s not interested, Margot refuses: “I have to say more than that. We had sex.”
Fed up, the roommate snatches Margot’s phone and texts Robert: “Hi im not interested in you stop textng me.” Instead of feeling relieved, Margot’s first instinct is to pity Robert, worrying he will turn to glass and shatter. And he does. A month later, he sees Margot at a bar with another man. Drunk with jealousy, he hemorrhages a slew of frustrated texts, callously drifting from “I really miss you” to “Whore” in front of her eyes.
One man’s fracture is another man’s fainting spell.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” wasn’t the first allegory to criticize gendered power imbalances, and “Cat Person” won’t be the last. But both works will live on in feminist canon because their protagonists’ uncertain fate challenges us to question where our society stands on issues of female empowerment.
Maybe Margot and the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” are truly unrestrained now that their male oppressors have imploded under the pressure to control. More realistically, however, Margot is just a 21st-century relic of a 19th-century narrator who dared to believe, mistakenly, that she was free. The narrator might be locked in an asylum to waste away, all the while dreaming that she escaped her domestic hell. Margot might feel sorry for Robert again and text him back, even though he’s angry and fuming with toxic masculinity.
At some point, many of us have been the narrator. We saw women helm companies, run for office and demand equal pay, so we thought we were finally getting somewhere.
We’ve clearly been Margot, too, or so many of us wouldn’t be tweeting, in horror, that Roupenian read our minds. We’re afraid to bruise men’s egos, even when they disappoint us. We’re reluctant to fully detach ourselves, even when we deserve better. We’re trained to find blame in ourselves, even when men are at fault. Same problems, different century.
Then the news cycle dredged up another queasy truth we’ve buried: Influential men with patterns of abuse don’t feel these tender, considerate qualms about us. They aren’t done fainting. They aren’t done fracturing.
And we still haven’t broken free.
